If you’re reading this what I’d really like you to do is to think of 3 - 5 things that are your predictions for how Youth Work will use the web in 2009.

Maybe you think more youth orgs will use particular social networks. Maybe more practitioners will blog or maybe blogging will die a youth work death? Maybe there will be more events like the UKYouthOnline gathering in September - maybe these events will replace mainstream conferences?

Perhaps we’ll see our first online ‘virtual youth work conference’? Maybe young people will campaign against youth services and educationalists using SNS to impose on their personal web space?

You get the idea!

What I’m hoping to do is put together various peoples thoughts into a nice fancy slideshow which I’ll then stick up on slideshare and you can share and embed it as you see fit and we can all look back in a years time and see what progress is being made along the youth work online journey!

Please DON’T write your predictions in the comments (and spoil the surprise!) - instead please email them to me at info@yomo.co.uk

in the subject write ‘PREDICTIONS”

list your 3 - 5 predictions

please also send over a photo (either of you or your logo etc.) and your name/job/organisation and also if you want a link back to your own site or blog.

As soon as I have enough predictions in I’ll draw something up - so no closing date but the sooner you send in your ideas the more likely they’ll be included in the main slides.

Finally a reminder……

what are your 3 - 5 predictions for how youth work will use the web in 2009?

(& feel free to use a bit of license as to what you think youth work is)

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Tags: digital youth work, dyw, Education & Skills, innovation, Innovation & Technology, youth work 2.0

I was reading this interesting article earlier in which Tim Brighouse suggests the need to change the education system to move away from a success/failure system.

I agree there’s a need to adapt how young people are educated and certainly there needs to be a better system for measuring abilities than simply assessing how well people fit along the scales of academia. A ridiculous thing I heard from a Head Teacher recently was that potential applicants for a job at his school, including among others a former Lawyer, were not even considered for interview because they had poor GCSE’s! Ridiculous to me, but then I did also think after that I could see the (silly) logic that teachers would be expected to help children attain good GCSE’s.

Its several years since I applied for a job but when I did I never indicated what GCSE’s I have. If you’re interested I have 3. I didn’t omit this information out of shame, I just assume that my higher qualifications and experience now stand for more than that particular time of ‘failure’ in my life. In fact I didn’t ‘fail’ as such, I wasn’t permitted to take more exams as I’d been asked to leave school prior to the exams (because of my failure to behave!). Yet it seems that had I been a teacher applying to that particular school, regardless of the successes I have had since that time, I would have been rejected on the basis of failure earlier in life.

There are many stories of people who’ve gone on to do extremely well in life despite academic failure. For me there were many reasons for my failure at school - some of my own cause, some to do with circumstances, and  a lot to do with the fact that it was a crap school, with mostly crap teachers using a curriculum in which I could find nothing of interest or relevance to me (I did mention this once or twice which maybe contributed to my early departure!).

In the article Brighouse highlights something very interesting which is the “.. correlation of school failure with subsequent predisposition to crime, homelessness and ill health..” Now there are obviously lots of possible reasons that such a correlation exists, is it though the cause of education that young people could end up on such a downward path? Do you think its likely to be the case that if ‘failure’ were no longer an option within the education system, the numbers of young people becoming involved in crime would go down, less would be homeless and all would be healthier?

I’m not so sure, but what I like about the approach Brighouse suggests is the potential it has to completely change the way we view society. I don’t mean in an airy fairy ‘we’re all winners’ way, but in a way that we seek to find and acknowledge where peoples talents really lie and not simply write them off as failures because they don’t fit well into an academic system that measures people in very limited ways against very limited standards.

Another interesting statistic in the article is that “Children are in school for only 15% of their waking time between birth and 16; that balance (85%) is spent in the home or community”. Wouldn’t it be interesting then for young people to get more recognition for what they achieve during that 85% than just how they measure up in the 15%?

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Tags: Education & Skills, policy

In the last post on the digital youth work programme I mentioned that I’d be looking to develop it along the lines of an ‘open source youth work’ approach. I’ve talked about this before but I don’t think I’ve specifically described what I actually mean. So in an attempt to do this I’ve created a ’slidecast’ to explain how I think an open source approach to developing a youth programme could work, and also to look at the overall aims for creating this initial ‘digital youth work programme’.

As I was working through those slides I did realise theres considerable potential to fail, mostly because for open source to work it needs a strong community, and really the youth work online community is still pretty weak and also somewhat guarded I think. Still, everything has to start somewhere so hopefully we can build on the few people who’ve already shown interest and in time we may get to the point where theres a strong enough online community to use the open source approach seriously in developing future programmes & projects with young people.

I’m not sure that I actually did explain the concept that well so if you’re still confused please say so!

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Tags: digital youth work, dyw, Education & Skills, innovation, Innovation & Technology, youth work 2.0

Apologies for the crap title but hopefully a better name will emerge as this develops. Thanks for the comments in the previous posts following the weekends UKYouthOnline event. The summary of my learning from the event is that I think there needs to be more debate/consideration about using the web as a practical tool for supporting young peoples development (and also for youth practitioners to work more effectively and efficiently).

With that in mind I said that I would start getting some ideas up for planning a ‘digital youth work strategy’. I’ve already thought about how to approach this and wanted to get early thoughts up, so here goes……

The ’strategy’ itself is going to involve developing an online programme using a ‘positive development’ approach. Once I’ve laid out my own ideas I’m going to explore methods for inviting people to contribute and collaborate into the programme along the idea of creating an ‘open source digital youth service‘.
So here’s the early thinking for the strategy:

• Develop a rationale for the programme
• Develop the practical programme
• Identify relevant online tools & resources
• Develop delivery methods including consideration for supporting practitioners to use the tools
• Invite collaboration to refine the programme
• Consider evaluation methods & methods for user involvement
• Promote and publicise the programme
• Ongoing evaluation and refinement

Now some things to keep in mind:

1. The programme itself will be (more…)

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   Tags: digital youth work, dyw, Education & Skills, Innovation & Technology, Participation & Citizenship, Resources, youth work 2.0

Jon Jolly organised an interesting debate at UKYouthOnline, challenging people to think about why they would use social networks at the local level - do you really need to use Bebo to ‘network’ if you already meet in person each week?

I added a bit in to this to ask the simple point - “why bother?”. We facilitated this by inviting people to jot their reasons & motivations for using the web in youth work on sticky notes. Then others ‘endorsed’ the reasons they felt had the most value.

It wasn’t a very scientific approach and it was the final session of the day so possibly a few couldn’t be bothered inputting too much into the actual chart but it did achieve the main objective which was to provoke some thought about the benefits of using the web. Unfortunately lack of time prevented us from taking this further and building an argument for how to use web tools effectively but that would be a nice thing to build on in the future.

I’ve attached a summary of the responses and you can see them displayed in (more…)

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Tags: dyw, Education & Skills, social media, youth work 2.0

Thinking about this weekends upcoming event UKYouthOnline has got me thinking again about OnTheUp. OnTheUp was the idea that came out of ‘Personal Development Reports‘ that I originally submitted to the Social Innovation Camp earlier in the year. I haven’t yet managed to dedicate the time to developing the idea further as I’d have hoped, and in retrospect I think that perhaps the Social Innovation Camp experience slightly hampered development in that what started out as an attempt to develop a tool to support informal learning became more focussed on being able to somehow develop this into ‘the next big website’.

I do think online technology could be a brilliant tool for ’solving’ this problem - but it needs a bit more thought than just banging out a site. So I’ve gone right back to the start to have a think about what that problem actually is.

I first became aware that there was a ‘problem’ quite early on in the development of the Young Movers programme. Young Movers was initially based on a loose remit of creating a programme for young people in citizenship. My take on this was to try and develop a programme that would help young people to become ‘good citizens’ - this meaning they would be the sort of people any community would be proud of and who would (more…)

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Tags: dyw, Education & Skills, innovation, Innovation & Technology, soft skills, youth work 2.0

I was reading this discussion about ‘Using Technology in Education‘ that includes a list of gut reaction responses by educators as to what their fears are about using technology. Some of the things I picked out from that list include:

• I feel like a dinosaur in a world of eagles.
• Not knowing the next step without assistance.
• The kids will know WAY more than I do.
• Not being able to troubleshoot when the kids run into glitches.
• Can’t figure how to do things.
• Biggest fear when things don’t work especially when the kids are flying along, it is so deflating.
• Not knowing how to do a task.
• Looking stupid
• My ineptitude will be revealed to the kids

So can you teach something without being an expert in it first?

That reminds me of conversations we had in the early days of supporting young people to deliver our training. By far the biggest concern young Trainers had with us was that they wouldn’t/weren’t taken seriously - particularly by adult youth workers. This was for a mixture of reasons - the obvious factor of age (very young people being asked to ‘instruct’ much older and sometimes elderly people), being inexperienced, and also because very often young Trainers would end up running a session that wasn’t within their normal expertise.

(Its probably also worth making a point that another factor was the attitudes from some Youth Workers who would make it very well known how ‘qualified’ and ‘experienced’ they were - an attitude I found bewildering given the purpose of their employment!)

How we supported young people to overcome this was to explain they should never assume they are more knowledgeable than the people in their sessions (young or old), and that actually this was not important. What was important was that they were experts in how we did things - they understood the course programme, the structure of the sessions, and our approach to delivering training. Their role was not to ‘educate’, but to facilitate a process through which participants would share knowledge and ideas (and therefore learn).

Everyone who’s ever done any teaching/training/coaching will be very aware that the teacher learns a considerable amount themselves through putting together and delivering teaching.

So I wonder how many of you that are involved with educating feel that in order to educate young people you have to first be an ‘expert’ yourself? Do you need to understand all aspects? or do you instead need to be willing to give things a go, experiment, explore and go on a learning journey with young people? Afterall if you’re not prepared to give something a go because you don’t understand it what sort of example is that?!

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Tags: Education & Skills, innovation, Innovation & Technology, soft skills

Heres a short film about the making of  ‘Hectors World’. You can see the Hectors World films on the thinkuknow website, set up by the Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre.

Whether theres any plans to create something similar aimed at young people I don’t know but I always think its a good strategy to target children as young as possible for stuff like this so that it becomes second nature. The thinkuknow site also offers a downloadable ‘Hectors World Safety Button’ that ’swims’ in the top of the screen and if a child sees something they don’t like they can click the button which will cause the screen to be covered ‘until they get some help’. What the likelihood of a child using that button is I’m not sure as I’m pretty sure its in most childrens nature to be curious about everything!

The buttons only for Windows OS which seems a bit sloppy (can it be that hard to do the same for Macs & Linux?!)

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Tags: age, Education & Skills, film, innovation, social media, social networks